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Yemenia Airbus crash: Bodies found, aircraft was faulty

New details have emerged about the Yemenia-Yemen Airways plane that crashed Tuesday with 153 people on board.

The plane, which crashed in the Indian Ocean, carried 142 passengers and 11 crew. Nationalities included 66 French plus people from Canada, Comoros, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Morocco, Palestine, the Philippines and Yemen. There were three infants, according to news reports.

A 5e-year-old has been found alive, and five bodies have also been found, Reuters is reporting.

AP, however, reports that that, “there were conflicting reports about whether a child survived. …Comoran and Yemeni officials said Tuesday that either a 14-year-old girl or a 5-year-old boy had survived, but neither report could be immediately verified.”

The crashed plane was an Airbus A310-300. It was flying from Sana’a, Yemen to Moroni in the Comoro Islands in bad weather. (See map below.)

French safety investigators along with advisers from Airbus are heading to the crash site, according to BEA, the French investigation authority that is also looking into the June 1 crash of Air France Flight 447.

French officials had determined in 2007 that the plane was faulty, Reuters says, quoting French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau. But Yemen’s transport minister disputed that, saying that the plane was checked in May under Airbus supervision.

“This A310 is a plane that has posed problems for a long time, it is absolutely inadmissible that this airline Yemenia played with the lives of its passengers this way,” he said.

“Some people stand the whole way to Moroni,” said Mohamed Ali, a Comoran who went to Yemenia’s headquarters in Paris to try to get more information.

Thoue Djoumbe, a 28-year-old woman who lives in the French town of Fontainebleau, said she and others had complained about the airline for years.

“It’s a lottery when you travel to Comoros,” said Djoumbe. “We’ve organized boycotts, we’ve told the Comoran community not to fly on Yemenia Airways because they make a lot of money off of us and meanwhile the conditions on the planes are disastrous.”

About the plane:

Airbus A310-300 planes seat 220 passengers in a standard two-class configuration. The first A310-300 entered service in December 1985. As of May, 214 A310s were in service with 41 operators.

Airbus has updated its crisis page to say that the company “regrets to confirm that an A310-300 operated by Yemenia (Yemen Airways) was involved in an accident shortly after 01.50 (local time) near the Comoro Islands. The aircraft was operating a scheduled service, flight number IY626, from Sana’a (Yemen) to Moroni (Comoro Islands).”

The crashed aircraft was delivered from the production line in 1990 and had been operated by Yemenia starting in October 1999. It carried two Pratt and Whitney engines.

The A310-300 parts are assembled in northern France, Germany, the UK and Spain. Final assembly is in Toulouse, France.

From Reuters:

The EU suspended permission for Yemenia to maintain EU-registered planes in February after it failed a set of audit inspections, the EU’s aviation safety agency told Reuters in Brussels.

The move would not have affected the doomed Airbus A310 plane since it was registered in Yemen. But it provides further evidence of European concerns over the airline’s operations after the EU Commission said the plane which crashed had sparked an EU inquiry two years ago.

The EU’s Transport Commissioner Antonio Tajani said it would contact Yemenia to see what had happened and planned to propose a global blacklist of airlines deemed unsafe.

A separate Reuters story says that the crashed plane was owned by International Lease Finance Corp.

Images:

Unidentified relatives of passengers react at Marseille airport, southern France, on Tuesday after a jet from the Yemen crashed. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)

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